In April, the trial of three ex-members of the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) - the ousted military junta that ruled Sierra Leone in 1997- 1998 and returned to invade Freetown in 1999 - opened at the new chamber of the Special Court for Sierra Leone. The three recently arrived judges were faced with a number of new challenges in court, including the decision by all three defence counsel to stop defending their clients in protest at the suspension of one of their investigators (see inset). During the hearings, several witnesses said that they had been victims of sexual abuse. One woman told the court that she had been captured in Freetown when the capital was invaded by rebels from the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and rebel ARFC soldiers on 6 January 1999. She was raped and forced to become a rebel's "wife", adding that she was made to walk from Calaba Town (in the East of Freetown) to Waterloo, a town thirty kilometres away. On the journey, at Allen Town, the witness said that the rebels had cut off a child's hand then cut out his tongue and hung a letter around his neck telling him to take it to their opponent, President Kabbah. She said that members of the Small Boys Unit (SBU), child soldiers recruited by the rebel forces, were made to guard her and stop her from escaping. At the rebel base of Lumpar, the witness alleged that many other women had been forced to become "wives". Another woman from Port Loko, in the North of the country, told the court that she had been handed over by a rebel to a certain "55". The man had ordered her to get undressed and had raped her, before another forcibly took her as his wife. A former clerk also testified that he had seen brigadier 55, the nickname of one of the accused, Santigie Kanu, in Waterloo. He also claimed that a woman named Zainab Kamara, the girlfriend of another rebel soldier, had been killed by the accused.

The defence made a number of attempts to exploit the confusion between rebels and AFRC members. It notably objected to the testimony of a witness who described the massacre of 71 civilians in a mosque in Kissy, a large district in the East of Freetown, by men that the witness had also referred to as "rebels". The prosecutor maintained that the RUF and the AFRC were part of the same criminal enterprise, and the president of the chamber overruled the objection. Another witness described the 1999 invasion of Kissy and told the court that the rebels had burned down houses with petrol. He was captured and had his hand amputated. When he arrived at the main Connaught hospital in Freetown, he saw that it was full of people who had had body parts amputated during those weeks of terror. Contempt of court

On 29 April, the Sierra Leone court began proceedings against five individuals for contempt of court. Three days earlier, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) announced the indictment of three Croatian journalists and a head of the secret services. Both proceedings were for the same offence: revealing the identity of protected witnesses and/or publishing extracts from testimony given in camera. In Freetown, the charges were brought against a defence investigator accused of identifying a protected witness, and the wives of the three accused in the AFRC trial for threatening and intimidating her as she was leaving the tribunal. The offence carries a maximum penalty of seven years' imprisonment and a fine of 2 million leones (about 770 USD). The defendants, who already boycotted their trial at the start, read out a letter in court, saying they will refuse to attend hearings until the issue is resolved.